Blog # 3: Brave New World (Chapters 1-5)

Brave New World is a book that I’m happy to read and I just could not put the book down with the limited amount of chapters I read thus far. Instantly, I was able to identify the characters and just how cruel, yet subtly brilliant the story is. I won’t go too in-depth with a summary but from the chapters I read, a group of young students (assuming aspiring scientists) go on a tour in a building called Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Building. It’s where groups of scientists experiment with fertilization of humans and embryos. The story I was instantly able to connect this with was E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” because it’s two similar passages of science gone wrong. Comparing both story and passage, it takes a very intelligent, boundary breaking, amazing concept, and turns it for the worst.

Mr. Foster and the director of the “tour” take the students around the building and show them their experiments with the embryos and the fertilization, and during this I experienced some horrible, yet amazing discoveries as the story went deeper and deeper as their tour went on. One of the parts I couldn’t believe was when the scientists experimenting with the fertilized babies in chapter 2. They tested these innocent babies just for the sake of science. Something I would always think about is scientists doing experiments and test on animals and critters. But reading on I already knew something bad was going down behind all of this. I connected the text with utopia and that’s exactly what the Director and Mr. Foster want to do. They want to create the “perfect” humans.

“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future…” He was going to say “future World controllers” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries” instead”. (Huxley 23)

I didn’t know how I felt about humans being tested on this way, and not just humans, but embryos and fertilization being tested on just to create a separate specimen of human beings. It was crazy to put in perspective that somewhere out there scientists are actually doing this in real life, and it’s scary to think about what they might create in the future or worse what they may not create. The story takes place in A.F. 632 which takes place in the future beyond today’s civilization. The scientists seem to want to weed out the past crop of human civilization and create a new, “perfect” line of humans but what’s stopping them is the delays in getting their formulas right. I’m hoping they never get anything right just for the sake of creating something they’d wish they never would’ve created because this experiment can always turn their backs on the scientists. I thinking creating something way too experimentally controlled can always have it’s cons and I’m interested to keep reading what will be made of all of this. The perfect child of blonde hair and blue eyes can’t be made chemically, just like life, it’s made organically.

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